One day after roiling tensions over the police shooting of a black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, began to subside, emotions flared anew on Friday as police identified the officer involved, but also released evidence that the victim was a suspect in a convenience store robbery moments before being shot.
The manner in which police released the information, which included a 19-page police report on the robbery — but no new details about the shooting — led to a spectacle of dueling police news conferences, one led by a white officer who seemed ill at ease and defensive, and the other dominated by a charismatic black officer who expressed solidarity with the crowd even as he pleaded for peace.
The white officer, Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson, gave a series of incomplete accounts that sowed confusion about whether the officer who shot the teenager knew he was a suspect in the robbery. The black officer, Missouri State Highway Patrol Captain Ronald Johnson, expressed his displeasure with how the information had been released.
Photo: AFP
“I would have liked to have been consulted,” he said pointedly about the pairing of the shooter’s identity with the robbery accusation.
All week, community members had demanded the name of the officer who killed Michael Brown, 18, last Saturday, but when it finally came, it was accompanied by surveillance videotapes that appear to show Brown shoving a store clerk and stealing a box of cigarillos.
Brown’s family, their lawyer and others expressed disgust at the timing of the release of the footage, accusing police of trying to divert attention from the unexplained shooting of an unarmed young man.
“It is smoke and mirrors,” Benjamin Crump, a lawyer for the Brown family, said of the robbery allegations. “Nothing, based on the facts before us, justifies the execution-style murder by this police officer in broad daylight.”
Missouri Governor Jay Nixon stood next to Johnson at their news conference and emphasized that the details released on Friday were not “the full picture.”
“I think the focal point here remains to figure out how and why Michael Brown was killed and to get justice as appropriate in that situation,” he added.
The day began when Jackson said at a news conference that the officer who shot Brown was Darren Wilson, who has served four years in Ferguson and two in another local department and had no disciplinary charges. Wilson, who is white, has been placed on leave and his location is unknown.
However, the release of his name was overshadowed by the simultaneous announcement of the robbery allegations, leading to questions about motives.
In a later news conference on Friday afternoon at Forestwood Park, a sports complex in Ferguson, Jackson said that Wilson had not been aware that Brown “was a suspect in the case” and instead had stopped him and a companion “because they were walking down the street blocking traffic.”
However, that highlighted the central issue: How did an officer’s interaction with an unarmed man escalate into a deadly shooting?
The videotapes, from an unidentified convenience store, purportedly show a tall burly man, identified by the police as Brown, shoving aside a clerk as he left the store with an allegedly unpaid-for box of Swisher Sweets cigarillos.
According to a police report, Brown was accompanied at the store by his friend Dorian Johnson, who was also with him when he was shot.
In the afternoon, the police chief sought to explain why the information was released on Friday.
“All I did was release the videotape because I had to,” Jackson said.
He said his hand was forced by requests under the US Freedom of Information Act from news media outlets.
He also acknowledged that he had not alerted the other police departments about the video footage.
“I should have done that,” he said.
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